VRL-DRAM: Improving DRAM Performance via Variable Refresh Latency

Abstract

A DRAM chip requires periodic refresh operations to prevent data loss due to charge leakage in DRAM cells. Refresh operations incur significant performance overhead as a DRAM bank/rank becomes unavailable to service access requests while being refreshed. In this work, our goal is to reduce the performance overhead of DRAM refresh by reducing the latency of a refresh operation. We observe that a significant number of DRAM cells can retain their data for longer than the worst-case refresh period of 64ms. Such cells do not always need to be fully refreshed; a low-latency partial refresh is sufficient for them.We propose Variable Refresh Latency DRAM (VRL-DRAM), a mechanism that fully refreshes a DRAM cell only when necessary, and otherwise ensures data integrity by issuing low-latency partial refresh operations. We develop a new detailed analytical model to estimate the minimum latency of a refresh operation that ensures data integrity of a cell with a given retention time profile. We evaluate VRL-DRAM with memory traces from real workloads, and show that it reduces the average refresh performance overhead by 34% compared to the state-of-the-art approach.